“Jacob and Dietrich are packed up and ready to head to the airport,” she informed him. “I don’t know what you did or said to them, but you need to go in there and apologize.”
“You want me to apologize to them?” he asked.
“Actually Roz does,” she said. “But I do, too. He’s your brother and quite frankly he’s the only other one of you, besides your mom, whom I can stand. So if you can’t do it for her, do it for me.”
“You do realize why they were arrested, right? I mean, if anything, they’re the ones who should be apologizing. It’s despicable what they were doing in those outfits down there on the beach.”
“Oh, don’t be such a puritanical prick,” Pandora said. “What happened, happened, Mo, and there’s nothing any of us can do to change it, but harboring all of these hateful feelings isn’t good for anyone. Jacob is all set to fly back to Berlin, and you’ll never see him again if you don’t get over yourself. And wouldn’t your dad just love that,” and she kissed him, the first kiss in eight weeks, and left him sitting in the front seat to contemplate what she’d just said. Pandora was right—his dad would get tremendous pleasure from Jacob’s leaving, and more, knowing Moses was to blame.
Back in the house, Moses went upstairs to the guest room, where he knocked on the door and was told to enter. They were just zipping up their suitcases when he shut the door behind him and said, not to Jacob but to Dietrich, “What you have to understand about me is that I try superhard to be a good guy in every aspect of my life, but sometimes I’m a little dense. Jacob knows this. I don’t mean to hurt anybody’s feelings, I don’t, but on occasion, like this morning, I’m caught off guard, and I do and say things I generally don’t mean. So I hope you can forgive me for my behavior, because there’s nothing I want more right now than for you to unpack that suitcase, find your swimming trunks, and come downstairs with me,” and he turned to look at Jacob, who remained at the window, his back to them.
“I can appreciate that sentiment,” Dietrich said, “but I think it is better if I go.”
“You? I thought both of you were leaving,” Moses said. “Please don’t leave because of what I said.”
“No, it is not about this,” Dietrich said. “It is about that other thing. I’ve told Jacob my thoughts, but now I must tell you. I might come from a long line of warring barbarians, but that does not make me one of them. I wish I had been asleep when Jacob told me what you were planning to do, but since I know this I cannot stay here and pretend it doesn’t bother me. Right now, I’m just someone who knows a secret. After, I’m an accomplice. And then there is this other matter of all of you being completely out of your minds. If you want to murder your father, I can’t stop you, but I don’t want to be there when, and if, you do.”
“Well, luckily for you, I may have a better way out,” Moses said.
“Better than blackmailing him?” Jacob asked. “Because Diet’s pretty sure that isn’t going to work anyway.”
“Why not?” Moses asked Dietrich.
“It is not hard to see that your father is invested in his marriage,” he explained. “Whether it is for love or for money or for another reason altogether, he will not let it go easily. Blackmailing him will only make him more adamant about staying. It will blow down in your faces. You will give him the reason he has been seeking to isolate you from your mother even further.”
“Wow, I see someone’s given this some thought,” Moses said.
“He has,” Jacob said, turning around at last. “I still think the only way out of this is a knife through his heart. But that’s me.”
“If you truly want to get rid of him, you’re going to have to be subtler. You need to manipulate him into leaving without letting him know this is what you’re doing,” Dietrich said. “In other words—”
“It needs to be his idea,” Moses said.
“Think of your father as an unwanted guest who has overstayed his welcome. How do you get rid of an unwanted guest? You make life as miserable as possible for him, so he has no other choice but to leave,” he said.
Moses chilled. Leave it to the German to come up with such an inventive, diabolical plan. “That’s great and all, but I still don’t think you understand whom we’re dealing with here,” he observed. “Nothing, but nothing, is going to separate him from our mom. That’s why he has to die,” and as Moses said this, he glanced at Jacob and understood that this was it, the one incontrovertible truth that none of them could deny any longer. All that talk of blackmail and bribery, all this talk of psychological warfare—it didn’t matter, because the only way to get rid of their dad was not to make life in the house miserable for him, but to bring the entire rotten building down on top of him.
“This is where we differ, and this is why I cannot stay,” Dietrich said, as Edith burst into the room.
“Pandora said you’re leaving?” she exclaimed. “Well, I forbid it. I just forbid it,” and she crawled over to Dietrich’s suitcase and sat down on it. “You’re family now. Tell him, Mo. Tell him he’s family. You are. We love Jacob, Jacob loves you, and thus we love you, too.”
“Don’t mind her. She’s high as a kite,” Moses said.
“Do not do that,” she barked. “Do not patronize me. I may be stoned, but I also lived through the nightmare of Julian Jacobson, and I demand your respect. I’m ready to torture the son of the bitch. He tried to kill me. He tried to kill all of us. Did you know that?” She directed this last bit at Dietrich, whose eyes went big, then narrowed into slits, which either meant he believed her wholeheartedly or not at all.
“You are pulling the river over my eyes with an oar,” Dietrich said.
“You pull the wool over someone’s eyes. You send someone down the river without a paddle,” Jacob corrected.
“But this isn’t possible,” Dietrich argued, ignoring him. “He may be crass, but he isn’t violent. No, you must be mistaken.”
Then Moses told Dietrich about it all, all the ways in which their dad had set out to annihilate them. He told him about the baseball and about the figs and about making Jacob watch horror movies that kept him up for weeks, until he was sleep deprived and half out of his mind with fear. “You don’t understand, because you didn’t live through it,” Moses concluded. “The only one who really knows is our mom and she has yet to admit he’s ever done anything wrong to us, much less to her. She’s lived with this fantasy of him, that he was the best dad he could be, when in reality his best is someone else’s worst. I don’t expect you to understand. Hell, I don’t even understand it, but there it is. We just want to give our mom a few months of peace. That’s all. We think she deserves it.”
“And revenge,” Jacob said. “I’d just like a little revenge, plain and simple.”
Dietrich just stood there, unspeaking, looking dazed, staring at each of them. He took his time, lingering first on Moses, then on Edith, then finally on Jacob. “No, it is too much to process,” he said at last. “It’s not that I can’t believe fathers like this exist, because of course they do, but where is the empirical data, the proof?”
“The proof is us, Schatz,” Jacob said. “We’re the proof. We’re still here, despite his intentions to the contrary.”
“He wants proof, I’ll give him proof,” Moses said, irascible, sick of trying to justify to everyone, including himself, why his dad had to die. He went to the door, opened it, and shouted for Dexter, who entered cautiously after a moment. “Dexter, tell your aunt and uncle what Paw-Paw did to you. Go on.” The boy gazed up at Moses, then around the room at the other grown-ups, and shook his head. Moses kneeled down in front of the boy. “Tell them, Dexter. Tell them for Daddy.”
“It was an accident,” he said slowly. “It was my fault.”
“But you told me that Paw-Paw slammed it down on your fingers,” Moses urged. “Why are you lying? You know what happens to boys who lie. They get baked in a cake and served for dessert.”
“Moses!” Edith rebuked him, as the boy began to cry.
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“I’m not lying,” Dexter wailed, rubbing at his eyes, then tore out of the room.
“Well, whatever. He’s lying. I have no idea why,” Moses said, ashamed of himself for being unprecedentedly cruel to his boy. But he could feel it now, the cruelty, coursing through him, and for a moment he saw the world as his dad must have seen it—his power-hungry, craven dad, who lashed out at those who could not protect themselves against him. And standing there, he could almost understand it, how it all might have started and how impossible it was to control or to stop. Even as he left the room, left them all there to chastise and discuss him in his absence, Moses felt the years of suppressed rage and disappointment gaining strength within him, thinking that if he hadn’t been saddled with five demanding kids and an equally demanding wife, he might have made something different of his life. Was this how his dad had seen them? Was this where his ferocious need to destroy them came from?
Moses went into the bedroom, shut the door, drew the blinds, and climbed into bed. He yanked the covers over his face and then he cried, quietly at first, then louder. He cried until he had no more tears left in him, then dried his eyes, blew his nose in the sheets, and fell asleep.
Moses awoke sometime later with a tongue licking his ear, at least that was the sensation, though there was no one there and nothing but the quiet stillness of the bedroom surrounding him. Peering down at his watch, he saw that the tiny screen was black again and sighed. Gibbs had given him the watch after becoming a spokesperson for Apple—he was plastered all over town on billboards and buses. Leave it to Gibbs to give me his leftovers and a dud at that, he thought, climbing out of bed and going to the window to pull up the blinds. The sun hung in the west, dripping yellow light on the backyard and his five boys, all of whom were stationed around the pool, the tarp rolled back, the shadow of something splashing, dark and shapeless, in the water. He opened the window and called down to them, “Is that Nieves? Don’t just stand there. Help her out!”
“It’s not Nieves,” one of the trips said. “Aunt Thistle said a coyote got her.”
“What is it then? Where’s your mom?” he called back.
They all pointed to the house and that’s when he heard Pandora, shouting her ferocious Jewish San Fernando Valley lungs out, shattering the quiet. Moses realized that he’d overslept and that it was approaching game time, for the sun was rapidly descending, which meant he only had about twenty minutes to shower, shave, and shit, though not necessarily in that order. But first—the pool. He was there, in a flash, looking down with his boys into the crystal water, not at Nieves, but at a mangy, bedraggled opossum, which had been terrorizing the dog and the backyard for weeks. The oversize rodent scratched at the smooth, tiled side, trying to gain traction and lift itself up, the momentum of which kept launching it backward. There were whispery fingers of blood leaking into the water from what must have been a gash in the animal’s underside. One of its eyes was missing and one of its back legs was bent at a sickening angle, broken, which must have precipitated its fall into the water. It made no sound, no cry for help, which, for reasons beyond him, made Moses incredibly sad. He watched it, as the boys watched it, the twins who pointed, laughed, and screamed in delight as it sank beneath the surface only to appear again, and the trips who stood back and watched in silent wonder, for they were older and wiser and understood a little bit more about the world. “Did any of you…Please tell me that none of you had anything to do with this,” Moses said, turning to face his brood. They shook their little heads.
If he pretended it wasn’t happening, then he could go inside and come out hours later to find that it had tired itself out and drowned. And while a part of him wanted nothing more than to do just that, another part of him, the better part, knew what had to be done. “Boys, go inside and get ready,” he instructed them. “Put on your dress clothes and dress shoes. Have Mommy or Maw-Maw brush your hair.”
“But, Daddy,” the twins said. “We want to swim, too!”
“Don’t be dumb,” the trips said, leading the twins away from the pool and into the house, Bronson glancing over his shoulder with an eerie, knowing look on his face.
After they were gone, Moses fetched the long mesh scoop from the pool house. It had grown dusty and cobwebby, for he had not needed to clean the pool for over a year. He returned to the pool, where the opossum was kicking with its three good legs, spinning in graceless circles, somersaulting in the ever-reddening water. It wouldn’t live long once he got it out of the pool. He lowered the scoop under the rodent and it somehow managed to understand what Moses was doing, for it gripped the edge of the mesh with its claws as Moses swooped it out, dropping the animal onto the deck, where it looked up at him for one tiny second before limping off slowly into the grass, leaving a trail of blood in its wake. Moses set the scoop down, breathing heavily, and when he glanced at the house, he saw his entire family gathered at the wall of glass, watching him. He waved feebly, the sun sinking even further behind him, the backyard darkening by degrees as his family broke apart until only his siblings remained, waiting for him. He went into the house, where everything looked and smelled and sounded different to him, as if between here and the pool he’d taken a turn somewhere and had either found his footing or lost it completely. Pandora wasn’t screaming and the boys weren’t arguing and his dad wasn’t nitpicking and the air didn’t contain the scent of despair, as if the house were preparing itself to usher in the holiday, this spring feast of matzo. It was time, he realized, running upstairs to prepare himself as well.
He took a brisk shower, then a beautiful crap. Someone from the network had chosen his clothes for him—the marketing department declaring he skewed best in “casual-L.A.-formal,” which apparently meant dark slacks, a powder-pink button-down, no jacket, nothing to obscure that hallmark body part of his, his hairy chest, which they wanted him to show off to his fan base, lonely housewives and their gay best friends. He was not to shave his face but to remain swarthy and to leave his curly black hair untouched, applying just a smidge of mousse to keep the frizz away, but that was it. He found these instructions taped to the bathroom mirror and followed them to the letter, down to the gold Star of David necklace, which he extracted from a small blue Tiffany box on the counter. They’d all been told to keep them on throughout the show, even the twins, who hated wearing anything around their necks.
Downstairs, the house was percolating with activity, a bubbling over with conversation and frenetic energy. The caterers from Canter’s Deli set up each course in a separate corner of the kitchen and lit the Sterno to keep the soup and the brisket and the potatoes warm. The florist arrived with the centerpieces, two exquisitely arranged bouquets of heliotrope and anemones, which had been Israel’s national flower. Vera Wang Wedgwood of Beverly Hills donated the table settings, Steuben of Thousand Oaks the stemware, which Moses somehow had to manage to plug during dinner, for product placement was paramount to the network. Their clothes, every last stitch, came from Barneys of L.A., whose representative called Moses now to make sure his mom’s clothes had been satisfactorily altered, and if the black pearl earrings, which she would wear, had arrived.
Moses answered the call outside in the gloaming, taking in the purple-hued sky. “Yes, thank you,” he said and was told that the moment the hour-long special was finished, they were to replace the clothes and the pearls back in the traveling bags and boxes and that a sales associate, who was standing by, would collect them. “Yes, fine,” he said, the rep wishing him a good Yom Tov. “Same to you,” he said, understanding suddenly that all of these sponsors, many of them Jewish owned and operated, were counting on him, which only further aggravated his already aggravated nerves.
Sunset that night was at 7:25 P.M., which coincided perfectly with the 7:30 airtime of A Very JacobSONS Passover. He hung up the phone, then went into the house, where Pandora was setting tapers in two silver candlesticks, for it was customary to light and say a blessing over the candles to usher in the holiday—his dad r
eminding everyone that because of Pesach they would have to add a special phrase to the blessing. It amazed him that his dad remembered any of this garbage, yet he was nothing if not a traditional Jew deep down, having grown up in a strictly kosher home to Orthodox parents. Once her husband was dead, however, Grammy Esther, his dad’s plucky, redheaded mother, had thrown out the kosher dishes and stocked the fridge with treyf—ham, pork, lobster, you name it—which she’d been eating on the sly for their entire marriage.
Twenty minutes before sundown, Gibson Gould arrived to great fanfare, all the boys crowding around him, as if he were their long-lost best friend returned. Moses looked upon the scene and felt a growing disturbance in his bowels, imagining what it would be like to lose Pandora and his kids to Gibbs. He quickly pushed away the unsettling vision by shaking Gibbs’s hand, a firm, steady handshake that contained the history of everything between them in it—all the love and jealousy and hope and regret of being two men from the same town who chose the same career, Gibbs’s thriving, Moses’s paling, each perhaps wanting what the other had—Moses, better roles, and Gibbs, Pandora.
“So it begins,” Gibbs said, heading for the wall of glass and the backyard beyond. Moses followed, for it seemed his old friend had something to tell him, but before they could slip out the door, his dad was upon them.
“Gary Goldstein, how the heck have you been?” his dad asked, smiling from stem to stern.
“I’m doing well, Dr. Jacobson,” Gibbs said.
“Dad, he hasn’t gone by Gary in twenty years,” Moses corrected him.
“Nah, it’s fine, Mo,” Gibbs said. “It’s not every day I’m in the company of a brilliant mind like your dad. I mean, brilliance is hard to come by out here, if you know what I mean, sir.”
“I do, I do,” his dad purred, for Gibbs had always known exactly which part of his dad’s ego to stroke. “How’s that new house of yours? You liking Calabasas?”
Tell Me How This Ends Well Page 33